Derrick Rose shows our city the resilience of Englewood

Thanks to the generosity of a good friend, I scored a ticket to a sold-out United Center earlier this month for Derrick Rose night.

The scene was electric. More than 22,000 fans lavished the Chicago Bulls legend with rousing bursts of applause and multiple chants of “MVP.” The crowd erupted the moment Rose walked onto the court, and the energy remained high throughout the night — from Rose’s pregame shootaround with his kids, through the touching halftime tribute to the final moments of the Bulls thrilling comeback win over the New York Knicks.

Over the years, Chicago has shown a lot of love and pride for Rose.

Rose earned the love with his play. His lightning-quick first steps, stunning crossovers, amazing no-look passes, fearless drives to the basket, astonishing leaps and thunderous dunks made him a fan favorite. The NBA’s rookie of the year in 2009 and most valuable player in 2011, Rose was “too big, too strong, too fast, too good,” as Bulls color commentator Stacey King often reminded fans during the team’s local broadcasts.

But Rose also won over the city with his story. Chicagoans feel pride in Rose because he’s one of our own. A local high school basketball phenom, Rose won back-to-back state titles with Simeon Career Academy on the South Side. After a year at the University of Memphis, he returned to Chicago after being drafted first overall by his hometown team, and his electrifying play had Chicagoans dreaming of a return to the glory days of the ‘90s when the Bulls won six championships. Rose helped the Bulls reach the Eastern Conference Finals in 2011, but a devastating knee injury at the end of the following season crushed those dreams.

While Rose was never quite the same player after that, his legend continued to grow, even after the Bulls traded him to the Knicks in 2016. He, arguably, had even better seasons after he left Chicago than his final year with the Bulls. Rose averaged 18 points a game in three consecutive seasons with New York, Minnesota and Detroit, a feat he hadn’t done since the year he suffered his first major knee injury. Rose even got votes for MVP, including one first-place vote, in 2021.

The pride and fire inside Englewood

In his post-Bulls career, Rose had moments where he showed flashes of his old self on the court, but he never stopped displaying the same toughness and tenacity that brought him to prominence. That’s actually the part that I love most about Rose. It’s that grit, that self-determination that reminds me of the greater Englewood area — the communities of Englewood and West Englewood — that crafted and molded him.

That aspect of his story is captured beautifully in a decade-old Powerade commercial featuring Rose with narration by the late Tupac Shakur. We hear Shakur reading excerpts from his poem “A rose that grew from the concrete” and how we’d celebrate the rose’s tenacity and love its will to reach the sun. As we listen to the words of the hip-hop icon, we see scenes of a teenager riding his bike through Englewood on his way to the United Center. Those neighborhood scenes feature glimpses of the vacant lots and boarded-up properties that proliferate in the area, signs of the devastation wrought by years of subprime lending and the foreclosures and demolitions that followed. The commercial closes with Rose walking onto the United Center court. I still get chills when I watch it on YouTube.

The words and images serve as a metaphor for Rose and others who hail from communities like Englewood and West Englewood. While Rose was blessed with physical gifts, the extra stuff that truly made him a legend came from the people and the community that raised him. It’s the same kind of mettle and fortitude a rose would need in order to achieve greatness, in spite of the damaged petals it suffers while trying to grow through concrete.

For many Chicagoans, Englewood and West Englewood are only known for their struggles. Both communities are among the city’s perennial leaders in many negative public safety, economic, and public health indicators. But those statistics just highlight the community’s struggles, not its heart.

The fire inside Englewood is often on display in countless acts of activism and advocacy. Residents show it by standing up to both the gangs and the police in demanding safer streets and greater accountability. The community made a passionate stance in opposition to the city’s decision to close several Englewood area schools. They didn’t stop fighting after the schools were closed, launching efforts to restore those buildings.

And I don’t know if anyone feels more community pride than Englewood residents. Just ask one of them.

If Chicago can show admiration for one of Englewood’s favorite sons, surely it can resist the urge to fixate on that community’s struggles — and instead show admiration for how Englewood continues to bounce back in life, just as Rose did on the basketball court.

Alden Loury is data projects editor for WBEZ and writes a column for the Sun-Times.

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